Where She Is and Where She's Going

There is a tide in the affairs of

women,

Which, taken at the flood, leads —God knows where.

—Byron, Don Juan

BY all rights, the American woman today should be the happiest in history. She is healthier than U.S. women have ever been, better educated, more affluent, better dressed, more comfortable, wooed by advertisers, pampered by gadgets. But there is a worm in the apple. She is restless in her familiar familial role, no longer quite content with the homemaker-wife-mother part in which her society has cast her. Round the land, in rap session and kaffeeklatsch, in the radical-chic salons of Manhattan and the ladies auxiliaries of Red Oak, Iowa, women are trying to define the New Feminism. The vast majority of American women stop far short of activist roles in the feminist movement, but they are affected by it. Many of them are in search of a new role that is more independent, less restricted to the traditional triangle of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church).

The most lordly male chauvinist and all but the staunchest advocate of Women's Liberation agree that woman's place is different from man's. But for the increasingly uncomfortable American woman, it is easier to say what that place is not than what it is.

Most reject the Barbie-doll stereotypical model of woman as staple-naveled Playmate or smiling airline stewardess. Marilyn Goldstein of the Miami Herald caught the feeling well when she wrote about the National Airlines' celebrated "Fly me" advertising campaign: "If God meant men to 'Fly Cheryl,' he would have given her four engines and a baggage compartment."

The New Feminism includes equality with men in the job market and in clubs, though it is not restricted to that. Already, women have invaded countless dens once reserved exclusively for the lion: there are women at McSorley's Old Ale House in New York, women in soapbox derbies and stock car races, women cadets in the Pennsylvania state police. Women have come to protest what seems to them to be the male chauvinism of rock music. An all-female group in Chicago belts out:

Rock is Mick Jagger singing

'Under my thumb, it's all right'

No, Mick Jagger, it's not all right

And it's never gonna be

All right again.

The New Feminism has increasingly influenced young women to stay single, and it has transformed—and sometimes wrecked—marriages by ending once automatic assumptions about woman's place. In the first issue of Ms., New Feminist Gloria Steinem's magazine for the liberated woman, Jane O'Reilly writes of experiencing "a blinding click," a moment of truth that shows men's preemption of a superior role. An O'Reilly example: "In New York last fall, my neighbors—named Jones—had a couple named Smith over for dinner. Mr. Smith kept telling his wife to get up and help Mrs. Jones. Click! Click! Two women radicalized at once." The term Ms. itself, devised as a female honorific that, like Mr., does not reveal marital status, is winning wider acceptance: for example, the Republican National Committee and the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission now use it.